The Solutions-Oriented Mindset

This blog is the second of a series of four highlighting our core values: social impact, empathy and support, being solutions-oriented, and everyone has a seat at the table.

You are working with a prospective borrower to try to help support their project building affordable housing, or employing people with disabilities, or securing a new facility for a school, and as you proceed, you hit a roadblock. Maybe it’s a lack of liquidity, maybe it’s a low value in an appraisal, or maybe it is escalating construction costs. What do you do? Well, if you want to take a page out of High Impact’s playbook, you roll up your sleeves and take a solutions-oriented approach to find the path forward.

Being solutions-oriented is a core value for High Impact because it characterizes how we approach all of our interactions—with clients, with their borrowers, and with each other internally. Rather than just identifying a problem, we want to also come forward with a solution, or at least with an attitude that is open to and supportive of finding a solution together. We are in a sector of the finance industry that is full of difficult and non-standard deals—and therefore we need to be excellent at finding solutions throughout our lines of business to be successful. Similarly, as a growing business, we naturally run into challenges at times. A solutions-oriented mindset is critical to overcoming them. And as a client-services business, we need to be willing to be flexible and creative to help our clients succeed.
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While being solutions-oriented is a highly prized value in our firm, it does not mean being willing to take on too much, continually circumventing well-founded processes, or routinely working long days or weekends. Those types of solutions are a short-term fix that will only serve to compound problems in the future. Instead, we want big picture solutions that make our work run smoothly in the long term for our clients, their borrowers, and our staff. That’s what we are all working toward together.